Our successes

The OH’s salary as a teacher is just sufficient to maintain the essential financial links with wider society, in that it pays the mortgage, the council tax, the TV licence, various insurances, the grocery bill, fuel and most of the other bills for the cars, and things like clothing. Everything else has to come from the croft.

We’re self-sufficient in vegetables, pork, lamb, chicken and eggs, and should be in honey and soft fruit this year. Combined with our aversion to a lot of the treats and trinkets the most people purchase each week, this means our grocery bill is dramatically lower than the UK average. We still buy apples and bananas, whether in season or not, because the boys in particular need their fresh fruit as well as fresh vegetables, and apples and bananas are our convenience foods - along with carrots and other seasonal produce from the garden.

As well as meeting our needs, the vegetable patch also provides a small surplus for barter, with a basket of fresh vegetables getting us a ton of organic horse manure (bagged). Surplus eggs can be bartered or sold for 80p a half dozen, bring us just enough cash to buy the oats and barley we use for chicken feed, while the excess cockerels go straight into our freezer for eating on special occasions.

Can crofting be successful?

Having been told yet again that smallholdings, crofts and small farms cannot be successful, this time by a neighbouring farmer, I thought I’d set out my reasons for believing they can be successful and argue that until our current water crisis Stonehead Croft was a success.

For me, the crucial thing is how you define success.

If you define success according to the prevailing economic, social and cultural wisdom, the anything like what we’re trying to do is doomed to failure.

You wouldn’t credit it

One of the more frequently asked questions we get, particularly since we were confronted with the costs of overcoming the water crisis, is “why don’t you just put it on credit?”

Leaving aside the fact that we happen to be among the strange minority of people who prefer not to buy things on credit, what many people fail to realise is that you need to be “economically active” to get credit at a reasonable rate of interest.

You have to have been a good consumer for many years, purchased lots of consumer trinkets on credit and then met your interest payments without defaulting or, horror of horrors, paying out the credit early.